"Elia
Kazan, as an
afterthought,
comments he wished he played up the corruption
part of the story in
more
detail."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A quasi-documentary crime film directed by Elia
Kazan that
tells
the true story of the 1924 murder of Father Hubert
Dahme in Bridgeport,
Connecticut, the subsequent arrest and trial of a
jobless drifter, and
the efforts of the state's attorney Henry Harvey (Dana
Andrews) to
uncover
the truth. The eerie look is enhanced by shooting at
the actual
location
of the incident.

One evening we see a lone gunman wearing a
light-colored
fedora and
a dark coat, walk up to the popular Protestant
reverend, Father
Lambert,
on the small-town Main Street and when within a few
inches from him,
raise
his 32-calibre pistol and fire. There were seven
witnesses but none
could
catch him or provide an exact description.

Political pressure begins to mount for an arrest as
the
police have
no clues and a few weeks go by without any progress.
The owner
(Leverett)
of the "The Record," the newspaper that wishes to
exploit this current
administration's failures in crime, does so as a way
of getting back at
the party that swept into office on a reform platform
to clean up the
corruption.
It wishes to use this story to expose the
administration as being inept
in catching the murderer. It has its ace political
reporter, Dave Woods
(Levene), write hard-hitting stories about the police
being amateurs.
The
newspaper owner hopes to win the election by this
crusade against the
reformers,
cynically wanting to get back into power any way he
could.

But the police catch a break and a drifter is picked
up in
Ohio who
matches the description and he is armed with the same
type of pistol
that
killed the pastor. He is John Waldron (Kennedy), an
ex-army vet, who
was
honored during WW11 with medals for valor. When he is
grilled by the
crusty
police chief (Cobb) and his lead detective (Karl), he
confesses after
being
sweated for long hours and identified by all the
witnesses.

The audience is let in on a secret that Waldron
couldn't
have been
the killer. An earlier scene right after the murder
shows the assistant
pastor being told in no uncertain terms by Father
Lambert that if he
doesn't
do it himself, that he will have to report the
assistant to a mental
hospital
so he could get help for his problem. It is that scene
that leads us to
believe that the motive for the crime was personal and
that, in all
probability,
the assistant did the killing.

The town has an honest chief of police and district
attorney, and
it also has the usual dishonest politicians. Henry is
told by the
nervous
party official, Paul Harris (Begley), that he better
convict Waldron,
that
the party better win the next election and stay in
power or else his
life
is ruined and he will take everyone else down with
him. He invested all
his money in a corrupt land deal and needs his
administration to buy
that
land from him or else he loses his life savings. The
catch is that he
tricked
Henry's wife Madge (Jane) into lending him money for
the deal and he
made
it look like she's in on the corruption. This comes at
a time when
Henry
is sure that Waldron is innocent. His investigation
finds that
Waldron's
gun could not have been the one used in the crime
because of a
malfunctioning
gun pin.

It becomes a question of what will Henry do in
court, and
this is
answered as he shocks the town by seeking to exonerate
the accused
drifter.
The grateful drifter is set free and the corruption in
town is only
touched
upon, but the case is re-opened and the killer we are
told was never
caught.
The Dana Andrews character portrays the real Homer S.
Cummings, who
went
on to become the attorney general under FDR from
1933-39.

This taut, well told story, is suspenseful in the
noir
tradition
of setting a dark mood. The acting is superb,
screenwriter Richard
Murphy
received an Academy Award nomination. Elia Kazan, as
an afterthought,
comments
he wished he played up the corruption part of the
story in more detail.